Abstract

Over the past two decades, large-scale transnational migrations between Central America and the United States have had a significant impact upon both home and host societies. In Guatemala, cross-border movement was spawned by the brutal civil war that devastated many indigenous communities in the early 1980s. Over time, this flow resulted in the formation of complex transnational networks and identities that span home and host locations. This thesis examines the manners in which a community of K'iche' Indians straddled between the highlands of El Quiché, Guatemala and an industrial New England city have responded to the deterritorialization caused by the confluence of violence and displacement. It describes, on the one hand, the context of post-war reconstruction in El Quiché, which is shaped by a fragile institutional peace process and an emerging ethnopolitical movement that emphasizes a pan-Maya identity. On the other hand, it depicts an inner-city space in the US where K'iche' labor migrants lead hidden, marginal lives, seeking to obscure any overt form of collective organization or identity. By examining the flows of people, money, commodities and symbols between these contrasting environments, the thesis shows how K'iche's in both communities maintain concrete and imaginary connections with each other despite the many ruptures caused by violence and dislocation. The thesis also teases out the manners in which today's cross-border movements, which involve ever larger distances, absences, and cash inflows, are both inscribed in, and differ from, previous local strategies of, and discourses on, internal movement and migration within Guatemala, which have long formed part of K'iche' culture. Specifically, it shows how K'iche's draw on their “mobile” past in order to maintain a sense of continuity in the present and elaborate viable identities and strategies for the future. Overall, the thesis argues that the multiplicity of strategies and discourses developed by K'iche's to cope with the uncertainty and liminality engendered by transnationalism is rooted in a longer history of hybridity that has enabled communities, families and individuals to anchor their identities at home, and yet move fluidly beyond the boundaries of community, thereby elaborating flexible identities that both incorporate and resist outside change.